Champeta Beat

My wife and I just came back from the trip that sparked this blog. It’s long and still not finished. That's Louis Towers on the right. Great trip, by the way.  CH

Cartagena De Indias hugs a westward facing, crab-shaped bay on the north coast of Colombia, facing Panama and the azure Caribbean Sea. Charming beyond description, its old city, magnificently intact and free of brand name encroachment, invites long strolls, museum snooping, dozing and imbibing. It is as much a tourist town as San Juan, Puerto Rico or Kingston, Jamaica but the tourists are overwhelmingly Colombian. It’s the Miami Beach of a troubled country, a retreat from decades of insurgency and drug violence. And Colombians from working class on up support an undistinguished but thriving thicket of high-rises in the Bocagrande and Castillo Grande neighborhoods, as well as its Spanish colonial magnificence. It also has the coolest fort ever.

Cartagena is also, manifestly, a music city. Much like the former New Orleans in its color, heat and openness, Cartagena’s eateries, drinkeries, shops and vendor closets exhale music through old radios and CD players tuned into a sprawl of ramshackle radio stations and spinning a data storm of bootleg CDs. The streets and restaurants are also full of guitarist/troubadours and little nobody bands – poor people in a poor land where plying musical talent for a living is about as good a prospect as driving a cab or selling crisp Cerveza Aguila on the street.

My wife and I just came back from the trip that sparked this blog. It’s long and still not finished. That's Louis Towers on the right. Great trip, by the way.  CH

Cartagena De Indias hugs a westward facing, crab-shaped bay on the north coast of Colombia, facing Panama and the azure Caribbean Sea. Charming beyond description, its old city, magnificently intact and free of brand name encroachment, invites long strolls, museum snooping, dozing and imbibing. It is as much a tourist town as San Juan, Puerto Rico or Kingston, Jamaica but the tourists are overwhelmingly Colombian. It’s the Miami Beach of a troubled country, a retreat from decades of insurgency and drug violence. And Colombians from working class on up support an undistinguished but thriving thicket of high-rises in the Bocagrande and Castillo Grande neighborhoods, as well as its Spanish colonial magnificence. It also has the coolest fort ever.

Cartagena is also, manifestly, a music city. Much like the former New Orleans in its color, heat and openness, Cartagena’s eateries, drinkeries, shops and vendor closets exhale music through old radios and CD players tuned into a sprawl of ramshackle radio stations and spinning a data storm of bootleg CDs. The streets and restaurants are also full of guitarist/troubadours and little nobody bands – poor people in a poor land where plying musical talent for a living is about as good a prospect as driving a cab or selling crisp Cerveza Aguila on the street.

One blanket term thrown over the many styles you hear spilling through the streets and out of the taxis of Cartagena is cumbia or vallenato, which essentially means it’s got an accordion, impassioned singing, and a shaking and rasping rhythm that’s nothing if not danceable. Sometimes it sounds like a polka and sometimes it sounds like Louisiana zydeco. It’s melting pot music, Creole music, drawn from all over the Caribbean, from calypso and merengue, from Cuban salsa and Mexican conjunto, from Africa and from South American indians. It is the consummate musica tropical, born in the fertile musical crescent that is the Gulf of Mexico.

Latin Pop blends in the mix, without overwhelming it. That varies, as pop music will worldwide, from great to garish, but some of the best is made by Columbians who have been caught up in the fashionista Gulf Stream, like stars Carlos Vives and Juanes. Our favorite, introduced to me by Taylor, is the unpredictable, slyly brilliant Shakira. But largely the air hangs as richly with obscure Latin melodies and traditoinal ritmo as it does with bougainvillea blossoms.

There is another music in Cartagena however far from the charts, the tourist enclaves and the beaches. If you’re young and poor, a prospect-less Cartagena barrio-dweller, you’re probably going to spend your weekend blowout time dancing to champeta. It’s boom-chicka-boom beat pushes away the cares of the world, and its tinkling guitars and exotic touches evoke the ties that connect the Caribbean to Africa.

Champeta is a hybrid music unique to its home city because of Cartagena’s history as a slave trading capital, a Spanish colonial stronghold, and a port city. Through the 1960s and 70s, guys from many nations worked the freighter traffic between Africa and Caribbean ports of call. Records changed hands and criss-crossed the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean. Reggae and dub music mingled with Colombian cumbia and Afro-pop and juju. Bob Marley, meet King Sunny Ade.

That seems to have been a potent mix for some, given the racial chemistry of Cartagena. The Spanish, who parked their huge ships at a coastal Indian village in the 1530s, brought a language, the Catholic faith, the Inquisition, a gold extraction operation second to none, naval power, and a slave market. The Spanish system hardened over centuries, bringing with it a caste system that obsessed over racial purity and that put African blacks on the bottom. The town of Palenque, which I really know very little about, was formed by escaped slaves in the 1600s and it apparently remains today an enclave of African-looking tradition.

We met Louis “El Rasta” Towers, a native of Palenque, and his friend and booster Manuel Reyes. Louis is a tall, beaming, very black man with many talents. Manuel is a forty-something DJ, journalist and promoter who has championed champeta music for years, so that Louis and his contemporaries like Monsieur Boogaloo and Elio Boom and Melchor might have at least a chance of spreading their music beyond their seaport city. His greatest success seems to have been the organization of a 2002 date in Europe for a hand-picked group called the Champeta All-Stars that blossomed unexpectedly into five festival appearances.

As it stands, this bouncing, shimmying, grinding music gets played in the streets and parks of Cartagena, sometimes live but more often over a truckload or two of amplifiers by professional DJs. Now we only got a glimpse of the Cartagena champeta business, but enough to see that it’s a shoestring operation. Manuel took us to the studio where Louis is recording. His engineer, a big guy called with a name that meant ‘little guy.’ presided over an ingeniously compact and efficient digital recording operation. It seemed to be a subdivided windowless bedroom in his mother’s house, and we know this because we met her. She was as sweet as could be and made all of us coffee on the patio.

Louis played us his four most recent sides. All were excellent. One was a double-entendre laced song with a pogo stick  beat called “El Machete,” which said that a man has to use his big knife many times a week to keep his blade strong and sharp. Other songs were about more everyday blips of life. Based on Manuel’s summaries, they could be country songs. Love and envy. Life and death. The music itself really does sound like Afro-pop with its trebly guitars and long-vowel vocals and Caribbean rhythms. Louis had integrated Peruvian pan pipes as well, which sounded great. It was, Manuel said, a revelation for guys like Louis to sing African music in their native Spanish. It woke up the ancestors, he said. But we were all most impressed when, during coffee time, the radio station  we were hearing from a patio across the street, started playing “El Machete.”

Manuel also took us to a Saturday Night “pickup” party, which again gets its name from the trucks that carry the gear. He drove a car packed with Louis, Taylor, myself and Manuel’s wife out to a rough looking but not rough feeling sprawl of neighborhoods. We stopped by the house where Louis lives and saw his art – remarkable paintings and drawings of traditional life in Palenque. Then we went down a rutted dirt street to the ball park where we watched a party come alive. The kids gathering at an inner-city ball park didn’t cop attitudes, dress after a fashion or behave like yahoos as far as we could see. They came, paid the cover (about 90 cents US for ladies. Two bucks for guys) and hung out. Of course they danced. This isn’t music you sit still to. I was shooting video and I felt like an idiot whether I stood still to get good pictures or bounced because I couldn’t help it. It felt exceptionally real, as far from the grid of digital mega-entertainment as I’ve ever been.

We’ve promised Manuel to do what we can to champion champeta, and this is a modest start. But I’m pitching a radio story and cutting the video up into something at least good enough to suggest the experience. Any further information on champeta or Palenque would be appreciated.

There's a good article about champeta HERE and some wonderful photos of the dancers HERE.

Comments

[claudia]

HI , I LOVE YOUR ARTICLE AND INFO. ABOUT THIS FASCINATING MUSIC. I GREW UP IN BARRANQUILLA, COLOMBIA ABOUT HOUR AND A HALF FROM CARTAGENA.I LISTEN TO THIS MUSIC ALL MY LIFE, THANKS TO MY NANNIES THEY INTRUDUCE ME TO CHAMPETA THEY TRY TO TEACH ME HOW TO DANCE. THEN IN MY TEENAGE YEARS I LISTEN AND DANCE JOE ARROYO'S MUSIC. BEAUTIFUL LYRICS.
THANK-YOU AGAIN
CLAU